st: Re: symbol for ">=" in graph text box

[Kit Baum <baum@bc.edu>]

< >
Quite so. "Upper ASCII" or "eight-bit ASCII" characters beyond decimal  
127 differ depending on operating system and 'code page'. I found  
yesterday that comparison of the ISO-8859-1 ("Latin-1") and MacRoman  
character sets shows that some characters are in the former and not  
the latter, and v.v.  The \leq, \geq symbols are present in MacRoman  
and missing from ISO-8859-1 (which is a subset of "Windows-1252",  
proprietary to M$ as MacRoman is proprietary to Apple). Likewise the  
superscript 2 and 3 symbols are in ISO-8859-1 but missing from MacRoman.

IMHO publication-quality graphics will only be available in Stata when  
Stata allows for Unicode specifications, that is, mixing character  
sets in a graph (as one can in a LaTeX text document) to include such  
things as Greek characters, math symbols, accented characters of all  
sorts in graphs, without resort to hacks such as tweaking the  
PostScript files. This is also important for output in the Results or  
SMCL log: if you're labelling variables or outcomes using accents, you  
want to be able to see them that way (and not just the common French/ 
Spanish/German accents).  Presently the situation w.r.t. output tables  
is more readily handled, as programs such as -estout- allow for the  
inclusion of any LaTeX directive when producing a TeX table.

Kit Baum, Boston College Economics and DIW Berlin
http://ideas.repec.org/e/pba1.html
An Introduction to Modern Econometrics Using Stata:
http://www.stata-press.com/books/imeus.html


On Oct 15, 2008, at 02:33 , Nick wrote:

> As I understand it, ASCII characters up to 128 really are standard.  
> From 129 up, it depends on your set-up. What is visible and easy to  
> one person will be invisible or impossible to another on a different  
> system. Stata cannot standardise what is beyond Stata.
>
> I am among those who directly or indirectly have not spelled out the  
> second statement sufficiently in various writings. At some point we  
> should hit the -asciiplot- help to make this clearer. However, I am  
> also among those who do not wish to make categorical statements that  
> may be quite wrong for set-ups I can't access (meaning, most).

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